Bohdan turned four in Canada. It was the first time anyone had ever celebrated his birthday, as far as we knew. We invited more than twenty people, including Jeremy, the boys’ godparents and their dog, several neighbours, the boys’ Ukrainian-speaking babysitter and her whole family, and several of their Ukrainian-Canadian friends. Everyone brought a present. Jeremy arrived late with a large, beautifully wrapped package. Bohdan’s eyes kept getting more dilated and he could not sit still. Peter helped carry the Safeway Spider-Man cake into the dining room, where we sang happy birthday loudly in the dark and watched Bohdan blow out his four candles. Just as the lights came back on my father phoned to wish him a happy birthday. My mother could not remember Bohdan’s name.
There weren’t enough chairs in the living room so half of us stood while we watched Bohdan open his presents. The grownups drank wine, the kids had soft drinks. The dog blundered around the living room, stepping on plates and barking. A guest dropped her wine glass on the hardwood floor and Betsy fetched the broom to sweep up the shards while I held the dog’s collar. Meanwhile Bohdan tore the wrapping off one gift after another. One was a fire engine and we never did find the battery holder after that night. If Peter was jealous, we couldn’t tell. Both boys radiated joy and good health.
A week later it was Halloween, something Peter and Bohdan had never experienced. Betsy had fun finding furry zip-up costumes for them at the local Salvation Army store, a dog outfit for Peter and a mouse costume for Bohdan. The boys wanted to wear the costumes all the time, and we let them bark and squeak as much as they liked. Betsy trained them to say trick or treat loudly while holding their pillowslips open wide to receive candy. We all laughed at the outrageous idea that total strangers would give them treats.
I did not go trick or treating in my childhood, nor did I ever wear a costume. For Mennonites — even my globe-trotting, liberal parents — the whole business of Halloween carried a whiff of the pagan. After Betsy zipped the boys tightly into their costumes and headed down the block, I enjoyed handing out candies at our door with the same cheerful Happy Halloween greeting for every tiny princess and toddling monster.
At home the boys dumped their pillowcases out on the living room rug. Betsy told me that Peter had stared open-mouthed as one of our neighbours poured candy into his pillowslip, and Bohdan was equally shocked but quicker to recover. They never noticed the cold. Bohdan displayed the effects of a sugar high before he unwrapped a single thing, running around the room and laughing crazily. We limited them to about half a dozen pieces each that night. Then we brushed their teeth and put them to bed. I kissed their heads and pinched their cheeks, and noticed they had that fresh-hay-and-milk smell that little boys do.
Peter’s tuberculosis treatment ended that spring when he was six. He was anxious when the final dose of the final week arrived. Betsy and I knew he would miss seeing the nurses. We’d bought a cake and planned to have a little ceremony. Rose came on that last day, a bit breathless at the door, knowing Peter would want to be fussed over. As Peter quickly dispatched the last of the medication, Bohdan watched me light candles on the cake in the kitchen. There were nine candles, one for each month he’d taken the pills. Bohdan and I marched the cake into the dining room, where Peter blew out the candles and I cut a piece for each of us. When it was time for Rose to go, Peter accompanied her to the door. He gave her a long hug and told her that she smelled nice. Tears streamed down his face as she left. He looked like a child at a parent’s funeral.
In spring 2006 we celebrated adoption day at the end of March. We told the boys stories of what they were like when we met them. Bohdan now referred to himself in Ukraine as a baby, as if that phase of his life were far away. Peter couldn’t remember any Ukrainian words although he’d gone to Ukrainian school every Saturday for six months. He wanted to be a Canadian, he said. He wanted the future right away. When Betsy brought out the cake Bohdan celebrated the first anniversary of his adoption by plunging his fingers into the moist layers, eyes protruding with joy. At bedtime Betsy and I took turns hugging Bohdan and Peter tightly, over and over at their insistence.
That night Betsy and I lay in bed talking about Peter’s first year in Canada. Peter seemed so content — he was almost a perfectly behaved child. Sometimes the boys had poor impulse control, Betsy said, but that was only natural after being so under-stimulated in the orphanage, and malnourished and neglected before that.
“And now everyone tells us how cute they are and how much they look like us,” I said. Betsy fell asleep tucked in close to me.
Even though I worked mostly for free, I was a full-time writer, and even though my wife swore at me sometimes I knew she loved me. Here we were after five years of marriage with a beautiful family, and we hadn’t even changed a diaper. This had to be good fortune.
V
Things started to go wrong for Peter in grade one. He had speech therapy in school because he could not enunciate certain sounds and because he talked so fast.
When excited he’d leave out parts of words, and even though he learned English with amazing speed, he was hard to understand. My father still had trouble making out what he said on the telephone.
Peter also began asking us why his mother did not keep him and Bohdan. At first we said that his mother just wanted what was best for them. But why, he insisted? Why could she not be their mother? He was relentless. We fended off his questions as best we could, thinking the whole story would be too much for him, but pretty certain he wouldn’t give up.
We got reports from school that Peter was pulling and eating half-consumed food out of the garbage at recess. But we’d heard that kids with an orphanage background often went through the trash or hoarded food. Peter complained about how he couldn’t make friends and how lonely he was at recess. This wasn’t surprising either for someone in a new culture, a new family, and a new language. At home both boys slept badly and after waking up to loud noises in the middle of the night, we insisted that neither one leave his bed until morning. Peter would wake up at 5:00 am and rummage through his toys in the bedroom until we removed them.
In the second half of the year we got a call from school. A teacher had found Peter running gleefully by himself up on the third floor, where only older kids were allowed. Peter said that when he went for speech therapy, he’d discovered the elevator in the middle of the school. He took joy rides when he left the classroom for bathroom breaks and recesses.
The elevator rides seemed innocuous to me, like Babar cavorting in the department store. Babar had been an orphan too, and he recovered beautifully from that trauma, showing how civilized he was by wearing spats and suits. We talked to Peter and his teacher to make sure he stopped wandering the halls. He just needed more supervision.
But there were issues in the classroom too. Peter got up from his desk at random and wandered around the room dozens of times every hour, helping himself to other kids’ books, and distracting the class. When we talked to him about his behaviour, he knit his substantial brows and looked away from us.
Then near the end of the school year, when Betsy was doing laundry, she found candy and cookie wrappers in Peter’s clothes. They weren’t things we had given him. He claimed that he’d picked them up in the schoolyard. His teacher said that kids were missing desserts from their lunch kits. It had been going on for a while.
When we confronted Peter a second time about the desserts he yelled and cried and denied stealing anything, this time looking straight at us with steely grey eyes. We asked the same questions over and over in different ways like professional interrogators and I felt guilty about our insistence.
Peter finally admitted to stealing the sweets. He did not seem remorseful, only upset that he’d been caught.
Betsy went to a make-it-right meeting at the school with Peter, the little girl who was one of his victims, and the principal. The principal asked Peter to apologize for stealing the girl’s cookies.
Peter turned red and hesitated. Then he said, in an em
otionless voice, “Sorry I took your cookies.”
“Can you tell Peter what you told me?” the principal asked the girl.
The girl was crying, but she spoke. “We don’t have much money. I asked Mom for the cookies at the grocery store. When she bought them, then she had no money for bread for her sandwiches.”
Betsy told me Peter had an aggrieved expression on his face while the girl spoke directly to him, as if he were the person who had been wronged. Betsy felt frightened. We’d heard about those kids adopted from Romania, that many of them had become criminals because of childhood neglect in their terrible orphanages. Later that week, after talking with Betsy, I made an appointment for us to see a psychologist we’d heard about who had many years’ experience working with adopted kids.
The psychologist was booked for months ahead and we only saw her near the end of August 2007, before Peter started grade two. She ushered the boys into a playroom so we adults could speak privately. Her office smelled like Pine-Sol. She had the manner of an emergency room physician who has seen everything and yet remains alert, always asking questions.
What was the boys’ history? How had they gotten to the orphanage? We told her the sketchy story we’d received, that their birth mother had abandoned them with a boyfriend, who then brought them to a hospital, from where they were sent to the orphanage. The mother lost her parental rights when she failed to appear in court. During Peter’s three years with her, there was drinking and fighting in the home. She was homeless now, no one knew for sure if she was alive. The father was probably dead.
Did Peter overeat or hoard food? Well, we had noticed him hoarding the food he’d stolen in the last few months. And he’d probably gained weight from those extra stolen sweets. Now that we thought of it, he did seem obsessed with food: when we went out to eat he analyzed each dish with the enthusiasm of a restaurant critic.
Was he overly familiar with strangers, touching them indiscriminately? Yes. At first we hardly noticed, but he carried on charm campaigns with new teachers and people whose names he didn’t even know.
Did he dismiss comforting gestures or refuse to ask for help? Yes. He tried to do everything for himself and resisted letting us touch him when he got hurt.
Did he vomit on purpose? Yes, recently, when he disliked our parenting decisions. Bohdan did it sometimes too.
Was he accident-prone? Definitely. His knees were bloody every week from constant falls and collisions.
Did he engage in nonsense chatter, incessant talk? Yes, he did. He frequently called me Mom, chanting “Mom, Mom, Mom,” even though I corrected him and he already had my attention. Then he talked rapidly until he got multiple requests to stop.
Were there sleep issues? Did he have insomnia? Yes, he was starting to wake up at night and in the morning he’d have dark shadows under his eyes.
Did he have trouble making eye contact with us? Yes. Almost all the time, except when he lied.
Did he lie about perfectly obvious things? Yes, he did. Again we had noticed it only recently, although the first instance I could remember was when he denied playing with the water heater. Sometimes you could catch him in the act and he would deny it anyway.
She asked similar questions about Bohdan, but we had little trouble with Bohdan beyond his over-familiarity with strangers and fake vomiting. After the questions, she called Peter and Bohdan in and spoke while we stayed quiet. The boys went back to the playroom.
She told us that Peter had something called attachment disorder. She said it was common with kids who were adopted or in foster homes, and who’d experienced severe neglect or child abuse. Such kids often had a honeymoon period with their new families, when they acted independent and highly capable. Our honeymoon was over.
The problem, she said, was that Peter had learned early on that the adults in his life were not reliable. It affected his development of self-control and self-regulation. For most kids this development happens as if they are building a network of tracks, like a railway, that connects them to their parents and other important adults in their lives. You can’t move the tracks easily once they’re laid down, which doesn’t matter if they’re going in the right direction. But Peter’s tracks, she said, didn’t go anywhere, because he could not rely on the adults around him in his early childhood. There was no station at the other end for Peter, and the only cargo delivered was shame and fear at his helplessness. He felt lonely and terrified.
I thought of that Dylan lyric about when your train gets lost. Poor Peter, building tracks in his brain that went off into the abandoned, empty station of the past. He could trust only himself to make the trains run on time, though he had no scheduling authority. So he took charge of everything he could, including food shipments. He also needed to be fearfully alert at night in case something awful happened, some terrible derailment that would mean additional pain and suffering.
We wanted to know if Bohdan was affected too. The psychologist did not think so, since he was only three when we adopted him. Peter’s problem was not just that he remembered too much of his life before adoption at age five, but that the tracks and switches in his mind had settled into survivalist programming.
Could Peter recover? Well, there was no cure. Your own history never disappears. But he could learn to cope with his past. It would be hard.
After the diagnosis, with Peter almost seven, we changed our approach. Betsy read books and blogs about adoption, and we both tried to implement the psychologist’s suggestions. If Peter got upset or was caught doing something wrong, we insisted that he stay in the same room with us after we gave him a consequence so he could rely on us instead of developing a sullen independence alone in his room. We wanted him to love himself as much as we loved him.
During her reading of adoption blogs, Betsy learned that many adoptive parents of kids from Ukraine hired investigators to search out more information about their children’s birth families. These investigators usually were translators like Oleg, who spoke English and Ukrainian, and understood how to navigate their country’s dysfunctional government bureaucracy.
In December we agreed that we wanted to know more about the boys’ background than the bare-bones story we’d been given so that, at the right time, we could share the information with Peter and Bohdan. Betsy made email contact with a Ukrainian investigator named Olga. We transferred a few hundred dollars by Western Union, and Olga travelled from her home in Kyiv to the west of Ukraine. She located the boys’ maternal aunt and sent us a detailed report together with digital pictures attached to her email. But after reading it, we thought it was too soon to share the report with the boys.
Then early in 2008 Peter got caught stealing lunch desserts in school again. Because the psychologist connected Peter’s stealing and food hoarding with his feelings of deprivation, and especially with the desire to know about his birth mother, we decided it was time to talk to him about her, however hard it would be for all of us. This time Betsy and I talked privately about what we’d reveal to him. It would not be everything, not yet.
Betsy sat beside Peter on our living room couch and said, “We understand that you have difficult feelings to deal with.” I stood in the doorway to the hall and watched. He wanted to run out of the room and Betsy held him. Peter’s body went rigid with tension and he tried punching her. “We’re your parents, and we’ll always make sure you have enough to eat,” she said. He struggled to get out of her arms, kicking and spitting. Then he relaxed into her body and cried.
“You need to feel your feelings, Peter, and the desserts won’t help you with that,” said Betsy. “Have you been thinking about your mother again?”
Peter nodded. I loved his curving lashes, how they slowed the large tears that rolled down his cheeks, and I felt something break open inside me.
“Your mother left you for her own reasons,” said Betsy, looking him in the eyes and holding his head with her hands. “She was really poor, and she drank too much alcohol. It did not mean she didn’t love you
. There is nothing wrong with you. Nothing.”
He rubbed his big hands through his eyes and cleared his throat. “I don’t know how she could have left me and Bohdan,” he said, “even if she was poor and drank too much alcohol.” I didn’t know either and my guesses held no more comfort than his.
Betsy asked him if he felt angry at his mom. “I could never be angry at her,” Peter said, shaking with sobs again. Bohdan stood in the doorway with me now and I reached down to hold his hand. He looked pale and scared. I was scared too. When Peter went into one of his rages, it was easy to imagine him at the age of sixteen, the most volatile and vulnerable member of a criminal gang. I knew that he’d suffered, that he was frightened to death of abandonment; but I was frightened to death at the thought of being the father of a criminal. I loved Peter, but he scared me.
Ever since the boys were four and six I had been driving them to Edmonton for spring break to visit their grandparents and my sister’s family. Betsy stayed home because she had to teach her classes at university, and it gave her a break from the men in her life. The trip also gave me and the boys a chance to bond. On the way to Edmonton we always stopped for the night in Saskatoon, at a hotel with a waterslide and free breakfast. I relaxed the rules and the boys got to play DS continuously in the car. We ate meals at fast food restaurants, I played Jimi Hendrix and Glenn Gould on the car stereo really loud, and we all had fun.
That spring of 2008, at the end of March, we went to Edmonton again, our third trip to see my family. The trip was a nightmare. Peter argued with me if I asked him to reduce the volume on his games, or he repeatedly jabbed his knee in the back of my seat, or he argued with his brother about whose turn it was with the most desirable DS game. In turn I barked at Peter, and several times reached into the back seat and wrenched his arm hard to make him stop hassling Bohdan. At the hotel in Saskatoon I drank an entire bottle of red wine after the boys went to bed, and that night Peter tossed and turned so violently I threatened to move him into the bathtub with his pillow and sheets.
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